Remarks of President Brewster.

This is a celebration. It is both a birth and an anniversary. For Yale and Connecticut it is a beginning of a new era, a new forward step in biomedical research. Here and now we break ground for a new Center which will bring together outstanding investigators. By their work together, they will push forward the frontier of understanding of normal and abnormal molecular, cellular, and organic phenomenon. From their insights, their experimental proof or disproof of new hypotheses, will come applications which hold promise of prevention, hope and cure of human cancer. For the National Cancer Institute it is also a milestone. We salute the fifth anniversary of the National Cancer Act of 1971. We also celebrate this occasion as an important symbol of the trilateral partnership among federal, state, and private centers of initiative. Each in a literal sense was indispensable to the accomplishment of the other. Yale is proud to be part of this partnership. Yale is enormously grateful to her partners. The sense of national need, the enormous cost of modern biomedical facilities and instrumentation have brought us a long way from the simpler pre-war days. National needs can no longer be met without the mobilization of national resources. The war taught us that. But we all had misgivings then about massive peacetime federal support of independent research. We feared strings at best. At worst we feared political abuse and favoritism. What would happen to the search for truth if research grants and contracts became corrupted by the same instincts for political payoff and kickback which characterized some public building and service contracts? We have to say, however, that the thirty years of postwar development of federally sponsored academic research has been significantly free of political abuse. Accountability, yes; distortion or dictation, no. This has been due, in large part, to the insistence that awards be made on the basis of peer review, rather than on the basis of allocation by bureaucrats or politicians. Review by one's peers is more difficult, but still possible, even in the case of grants for institutional centers. The National Cancer Institute is to be commended for sticking to this tradition. Not a little of the credit goes to the only man in the nation who had the full confidence of both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kennedy-my friend Benno Schmidt. The strategy for the deployment of resources for research relevant to cancer was convincingly above the claims of the self-interest of any particular institution; for it was developed by an ad hoc group under a man who was in one place when he drew the grand design, and, alas, in another when the grand design was executed-Lew Thomas. 233